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Pelosi will be seen as the culmination of the trend toward a more centralized and more powerful leadership of the House.

It seems the norm today that the speaker has the power to speak for the majority caucus, to use the caucus to keep members in line, to reward those who help the party and punish those who don't, and for the House leadership to have a lot of say about who becomes committee chair and what agenda those committee chairs pursue.

But this was not always the case. For the 40 years from 1954 to 1994 when Democrats held the House of Representatives, speakers were important, but the Democratic Caucus was divided between conservative southerners and progressives from the rest of the country. This division mean that Democrats were not unified, and leadership did not come primarily from the top, but was distributed among committee chairs and other actors.

As our political parties have become more polarized and more unified in what they believe, speakers have become much more powerful.

Today, there will be some difference between speakers like Gingrich and Pelosi who more actively centralized leadership, or those like Hastert and what Speaker-elect Boehner is promising, a somewhat greater deference to committee chairs and regular order. But in the big scheme of things, all of these speakers are more powerful party leaders than their predecessors as they lead ideologically unified caucuses.

If you liked Nancy Pelosi's politics, you liked that she used the speakership to have the House pursue a strong Democratic agenda, to push her own president to be truer to Democratic principles. If you didn't like her politics, you did not like that she lead the House toward those ends. But there is no doubt that she is the prototype of a modern, powerful, centralized speaker of the House.

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